The Pope: Francis, Benedict, and the Decision That Shook the World by Anthony McCarten

Author:Anthony McCarten [McCarten, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786827852
Google: LKL8DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07VF7F18P
Publisher: Flatiron Books

BENEDICT AND THE “DICTATORSHIP OF RELATIVISM”

The greatest threat to Catholicism perceived by Pope Benedict was from what he called in his last speech before election a “dictatorship of relativism.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines relativism as a philosophical concept in which “the truth or justification of moral judgments is not absolute, but relative to the moral standard of some person or group of persons.” It is understandably anathema to the Catholic Church’s adherence to absolutism, in which there is only one truth. Benedict believed that the faithful should strive to live by the unwavering moral standards of the church and its teachings, not that the church should update its views on such controversial moral issues as contraception, marriage, and homosexuality to sustain its position in the modern world.

This belief that truth, in the Christian sense, was under threat—by what Benedict described in 1999 as “the dissolution of law through the spirit of utopia … [where] the real and ultimate source of law becomes the idea of the new society: which is moral, of juridical importance and useful to the advent of the future world”—was, on the other hand, considered by many to be positive progress toward greater freedom and human rights. But the new pope remained fearful that if the “dictatorship of relativism” were allowed to remain, people would forget the concept of sin and become detached from the morals of God:

The majority determines what must be regarded as true and just. In other words, law is exposed to the whim of the majority, and depends on the awareness of the values of the society at any given moment, which in turn is determined by a multiplicity of factors.

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